The development community and developing countries seek to harness Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as tools of poverty reduction and sustainable development. But poverty is extremely complex and understanding whether ICTs can help alleviate it requires rigorous assessment.

Over the last ten years many agencies have invested in, and will continue to invest in, ICT pilot projects. The purpose of such investment is to gain insights as to how best to use new technologies as part of the efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. These pilot projects raise three crucial questions: Is there an identifiable relationship between the alleviation of poverty and ICTs? How helpful are the current Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) criteria for assessing ICT pilot projects? and where the ICT pilot project has been a proof of concept, how can it be assessed in these terms, i.e. against wider development priorities and its potential for replication and scale?

This handbook, commissioned by infoDev and prepared by a team at GAMOS, reviews the experience of infoDev and others in supporting ICT pilot projects in developing countries, and proposes a framework for assessing the effectiveness of these pilot projects. It provides guidance not only on how to design effective M&E components of ICT pilot projects, but also on how to go "beyond" traditional M&E to develop more forward-looking evidence of the potential broader impact of such pilot projects if taken to a larger scale.